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by davebren 22 days ago
Newton did it at 23 and there would have been very few people with mathematical training. The LLM would be trained on the entirety of recorded human knowledge and mathematics up to that point, and would get to use a lot more energy so it still has a massive material advantage over young Isaac. Yet I don't believe calculus would magically appear in its response.
1 comments
necovek 22 days ago
A good way to look at it is to compare it to today: LLMs are already trained and are operationalizing a lot more mathematical knowledge than any human, including experts.

Why are they not coming up with paradigm shift in knowledge expression/discovery like humans did back then?

Are we just not prompting them right?

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famouswaffles 21 days ago
LLMs have been trained on a lot more data than any single human (text wise at least) for years now and these sort of results have only been possible for the latest crop of models in the past few months. Models get better as they get better.
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necovek 20 days ago
The argument is whether models of today, suitably trained on pre-17th century data (if comparable quantity was available) would be able to "invent" calculus et cetera.

If we believe today's models are sufficiently capable to have been able to do so, why are we not getting these types of results today compared to the entire world knowledge and especially math?

Are research mathematicians simply not prompting LLMs in the right way?

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